feed

Feed asks you to bring a few things and forget a few things. Got your love for zombie lore and pop culture, enabling you to grin from ear to ear every time the story references Romero or Whedon? Good. Got your willingness to cheer for tech-savvy characters who may be a bit single-minded when it comes to uncovering The TruthTM no matter what the price? Good. Got your love for complex politics and intelligent villains? ...Might want to leave that at the security booth at the entrance. I promise you'll get it back unharmed at the end of the novel, which will come sooner than you expect.

Because this is one hell of a thriller, that hits the ground running and barely lets up for a second for almost 600 pages. McGuire paints a detailed picture of a society where the zombie virus has been endemic for 25 years - the only thing the George Romero movies got wrong was that the dead rising would be an apocalypse; instead, it's turned the entire world into a low-intensity war zone where an outbreak can happen anywhere at any time and you need to be constantly on your toes, with everyday life turned into a never-ending parade of blood tests, airlocks and security checks. She gives us a team of heroic news bloggers to cheer for (named Georgia, Shaun and Buffy, because what else would you name your kids when they'll have to spend their lives surviving zombies), who get to cover the presidential election and find themselves uncovering things the people in power want to hide at any cost. The occasional clunky narration (some of the actual blog posts we get to read, oh dear) aside, it's both fun and enthralling. And the only thing that keeps me from loving it unreservedly is the nagging feeling that I'm watching a Scooby Doo episode, where the villains are easily identified, their motivations ludicrously one-dimensional, and their underestimation of our heroes verges on the suicidal. I have enough trouble believing that news blogs will still be seen as something edgy and new in the year 2040; that career politicians would not even understand how the web works is just a liiiittle too convenient.

But hey, Buffy wasn't The Wire in terms of politics either, and I can overlook that as long as I get my daily dose of brains and the sort of storytelling that makes me want to overlook its flaws.